Biden just needs to get things done
I was briefly trapped, once, in Walter Cronkite’s closet. It was 2007, a couple of years before he died. The grand news anchor had been given an office for life at the top of the CBS building in New York, and I had gone to talk to him about the fate of the media. It was not terribly interesting — a bit like interviewing a Prussian cavalry officer about drone warfare.
But we parted on good company and I withdrew, with suitable obsequiousness, through what I thought was the door. Straight into his walk-in closet. When I sheepishly emerged, he was asleep.
Back then there was certainly a somnolence about the mainstream US media, a resting-on-laurels patrician grandeur — walk-in closets for the anchors, self-regarding “journalism studies” courses for the youngsters. It all suggested that, in the internet age, they didn’t know what was about to hit them.
Well, it’s hit them now. Right between the eyes. Both the Fox and CNN news channels are about to be displaced by Newsmax (to the right) and MSNBC (to the left). Not that it matters too much. Today, the traditional networks are largely watched by people whose hands shake too much to change the channel when the adverts come on for Viagra or dentures.
In fact, according to Pew research, more than half of Americans get some or most of their news from social media, mainly Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. And as Pew points out, this new-age media isn’t particularly helpful: Americans who turn to social media for political news are not only “less aware and knowledgeable about a wide range of events and issues”, but they are also “more likely than other Americans to have heard about a number of false or unproven claims”.
Perhaps the biggest of those claims is that Donald Trump won the election. Certainly large numbers of Americans believe it: around 32% according to a recent CNN poll. Meanwhile, YouGov reports that one in five voters — and 45% of Republicans — supported the storming of the Capitol.
What are we supposed to do with them? In the new age of Biden, the call goes out, let the values of pluralism that he would have recognised as a young man — the values of Walter Cronkite in his pomp — be the lodestone for the healing nation. Blitz the dotty folk with real news, regulate social media, tell the truth in White House press briefings and, most importantly, respect facts. Breathe in. Respect truth. Breathe out.
It’s a seductive suggestion. But the philosopher kings and queens are wary. They wonder if the answer to ignorance is something other than knowledge, something even more difficult to pin down. In a recent column for the Atlantic, Anne Applebaum wondered what we should do with the “seditionists” who stormed the capital. Her conclusion: “Drop the argument and change the subject.”
Don’t bother with fact-checking. Don’t harangue people about Democracy and Freedom and the American Way. In fact, stay right off these subjects.
There is a growing body of academic research that supports this view — a body added to recently by the Cambridge philosophy research fellow, Daniel Williams. In a blog published by the LSE, Williams introduces us to the idea of “rational motivated ignorance”.
“For a typical citizen,” Williams says, “political knowledge is just as often a liability as a source of power. Ignorance protects us from painful truths, insulates us from responsibility for our actions, and sustains the relationships that we depend upon for meaning and belonging. To understand and address societal ignorance, we must come to terms with such benefits.”
Here we return to Applebaum’s solution of simply changing the subject. As Williams puts it: “When societal ignorance is rational motivated ignorance, the solution cannot be ordinary forms of knowledge dissemination, persuasion, and fact checkers. Instead, our solutions must be much more targeted towards the interests and incentives that make knowledge costly for individuals.”
To which Joe Biden might reply: Huh? What does this actually mean? What should I do?
“Make the problem narrow, specific, even boring, not existential or exciting,” is Anne Applebaum’s suggestion. “’Who won the 2020 election?’ is, for these purposes, a bad topic. ‘How do we fix the potholes in our roads?’ is, in contrast, superb.” What this suggests — both for those who want to reclaim the Republican party and for those who want to press ahead with the Democratic agenda — is a move that is neither left nor right, but down.
It may not take the Democrats in the comfortable direction of the middle way. In fact, Biden’s unity agenda — some kind of bipartisan fudge that brings the nation together — might be a mirage best avoided. Instead, say a number of Democrats, what America needs is something far more radical.
They agree with Applebaum that the only way to forward is to simply get on and fix things. No doubt they’ll point to Obama’s first term, which was stuffed with serious misjudgements: they fruitlessly waited in vain for Republican support before spending money on infrastructure; they abandoned radical plans to create something like the NHS for all Americans, when in fact even the watered-down Obamacare was fought against tooth and nail by the Congressional GOP and still is.
David Sirota, an advisor to Bernie Sanders, wrote recently that the healthcare woes of the Obama administration “should be a harrowing cautionary tale for Biden on both the policy and the politics.” But Biden should know better: “He had a front-row seat in watching a bad-faith Republican opposition kill a much-needed initiative, and then use Democrats’ failure to deliver to win at the polls. He of all people should know that this story never ends well.”
And so America’s new President faces a paradox. In order to win back the middle ground, perhaps Biden needs to be radical. Certainly, he needs to reorder America — to actually provide solutions in a way that Donald Trump mainly failed to do.
As for where Biden should start, he could do worse than return to the musings of Donald Trump’s strategist Steve Bannon. Following the 2016 election, he called for a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill and tax increases on the rich, boasting that “if we deliver, we’ll get 60% of the white vote and 40% of the black and Hispanic vote and we’ll govern for 50 years”.
Well, that doesn’t sound too bad for the Biden team; the philosophers and the party radicals leading the way. Perhaps, as Walter Cronkite used to say, “that’s the way it is”.
Justin Webb presents the Americast podcast and Today on Radio Four. His Panorama documentary “Trump the Sequel”, is available now on Iplayer
JustinOnWeb 
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SubscribeAnother utterly and hopelessly delusional article by Webb. He really does live in a different world to the rest of us. The only thing that Biden will ‘shake up’ is the US energy industry, by destroying it. And he may well ‘shake up’ the ME in the same way.
The fact is that Biden barely knows where he is and what day he is. His track record as a politician shows him to be the most incompetent and corrupt person to have become president since the 19th century. And his administration has absorbed, and is implementing, every single bad idea available.
Not at all. I think JW and you aren’t wildly apart.
And his administration has absorbed, and is implementing, every single bad idea available.
You see bad ideas. Perhaps most sane people see bad ideas, but the people pushing them do not. I think far too often we give the left convenient excuses by casting lousy outcomes as the result of ill-conceived plans or bad advice or something other than intent. When a person or group repeatedly does things that have foreseeable consequences and those consequences are negative, you have to consider that this is intentional.
Power is the goal, absolute power.
“The only thing that Biden will ‘shake up’ is the US energy industry, by destroying it”
A curious idea. Are you suggesting that American’s will stop consuming energy? Because unless they do, energy production will continue as busily as ever. Or are you saying that America will discover new and less environmentally damaging ways of producing energy? But what would be wrong with that? Isn’t that what we want?
Americans will pay more, that’s for sure. But yes, energy production will be disrupted. That’s the whole point. The whole country will be like California, a state who can’t even keep the lights on.
The American fuel industry has broken the ME cartel and caused Russia to limit expansion, but that is ending. The ME cartel will become important again. The Chinese don’t mind paying more with their new American dollars. Everybody makes more money except for American fuel producers. The trend to added US solar will benefit Chinese producers as well, although India might find a way to squeeze into that market. The collapse of US energy helps many others at the expense of US producers. But that fuel remains banked for the day it will be needed.
“destroying the US energy industry” doesn’t mean Americans will stop consuming energy, it means they would have to buy it from elsewhere at possibly great cost and would the possibility of being blackmailed by a hostile supplier.
so very true
You think way too highly of Biden, that guy doesn’t even know what day it is, he is a puppet, and will soon be jettisoned off for Harris, who won about 2% of the democrat votes in the primaries. She is so popular even democrats don’t fall for her fake maniacal laughter.
The double-standards in the US is spectacular to behold. We had 4 years of “muh russia” with zero evidence to hamstring a president. We have ample evidence of irregularities in the 2020 election, but nobody wants to know, nothing to see here, and if you do say it you are a “domestic terrorist”.
Killing off tens of thousands of construction jobs on day one, ending the effort against opium addiction, banning certain terms, ruling by EO, the list goes on. Absolute trainwreck for a country that would almost be better being split in two.
is the author hoping for a job with Team Biden? Thus far, the man has fired a lot of people with a wholly bad faith act of trade with a neighbor, increased the price insulin and epi pens, and moved to damage women’s sports. I keep looking through the list of EO’s for something, anything, that can even remotely be considered pro-America.
Certainly, he needs to reorder America ” to actually provide solutions in a way that Donald Trump mainly failed to do.
What does “reorder” mean specifically? We’ve all read and heard about various figures on the left calling for cleansings, deprogrammings, and re-education, and no one seems to notice either how dehumanizing that is or how previous such attempts have ended in disaster.
” they abandoned radical plans to create something like the NHS for all Americans, when in fact even the watered-down Obamacare was fought against tooth and nail by the Congressional GOP and still is.”
Because it’s unaffordable. Who can pay $1500 a month for insurance that covers nothing until you’ve paid a deductible of $15,000?
No, its because they look at our ‘NHS’ and can see clearly that it doesn’t work and never has. No good telling Webb of course: he is another of those BBC Socialists.
For what everyone pays per capita (lower than most European countries) it has relatively good outcomes.
No, it really doesn’t. Check cancer survival stats. They are not good. Testing and treatment is expensive.
I’d agree that it doesn’t work but that’s mostly a function of trying to morph a system designed for healthcare as it was in 1948 to today’s medical advances. No one was expected to even live in 1948 to what people live to today. Nor was the care available then adequate to today. Certainly more could be spent to better outcomes as well as access by reducing long waits that lead to poor outcomes but then taxes have to be raised significantly. In addition, much of the complaints you hear about the NHS concern the bureaucracy involved as well as the attitudes of those who work for it. Money doesn’t solve those problems.
“they look at our ‘NHS’ and can see clearly that it doesn’t work and never has.”
Bad timing, Andy! The NHS handling of the Covid vaccine is acknowledged on all sides to be a huge success. Contrast (for example) the Serco disaster.
Mr Webb would not be able to make his Bannon point if he were a BBC socialist.
Thats why Americans pay 2.7 times per capita than a Brit and yet they have worse health outcomes in virtually all categories? Very efficient system! At least Europe, the UK and Australia have good affordable health care systems while the USA does not-they hate “socialism”, although most people would be hard pressed to even define it! Just like “Marxism”!!
the outcomes have far more to do with individual habits that the health care system. Being a sedentary person who is 50 pounds overweight and then blaming some doctor is mostly missing the point, none of which undermines the pricing reality of O-care plans.
It very much depends on what you consider worse health outcomes. Check out NHS cancer survival stats and compare them to the US. I’m fine if you want every expense spared on your care. But not on mine. I do agree with you that Obamacare is unaffordable. That’s the point.
I don’t understand the comment, at the very top US health care is the best, most prompt, most innovative in the world,
and at the very “lowest” level in terms of income, the poorest Americans actually get free high quality care, it is the large middle class that is squeezed between high costs for care and for insurance.
At the top levels care in such English-speaking countries as the UK, Canada, Australia, is very good,
but for the “middle class”, in Canada and the UK certainly it is slow, not innovative, waiting times are long,
many Canadians go to the US for prompt high quality services, especially elective surgery
The health business is a mess because nobody accepts that some people require very expensive care they can never afford and the really poor can’t afford any care. That solution is to fully means test and subsidize those two at taxpayers expense and provide commercial risk based insurance to the rest where risk expense can be calculated. Those in the to classes have limited choice the majority can choose as their commercial insurance provides.
“I was briefly trapped, once, in Walter Cronkite’s closet. It was 2007, a couple of years before he died.”
Well, I’d have been fairly surprised if he’d gone to interview Cronkite after he’d died.
Oddly, lazy writing like that didn’t make me any better disposed to what followed.
2007 was a couple of years before he died. The additional information is provided to give context to the date – Walter was quite elderly at this time.
I don’t accept Mr Webb’s two premisses: that Biden won, and that Biden wants to unite and heal the country; to go forward.
Without going into all the copious and compelling evidence, how can he think that this repulsive old groper, who didn’t bother to campaign, couldn’t express his thoughts, and had serious questions to answer on money from the Ukraine, Russia, and China, got more votes than Obama? How come he polled worse than Mrs Clinton in all counties, except the disputed ones, where he got Zimbabwean sized turnouts? How did he get fewer African American votes everywhere than Obama, except in the disputed counties, where he got deluges of African American votes at dead of night? 90%, 100%, and 200% per cent turnouts, all for Biden in the disputed counties – except, occasionally, 3% for Trump?
Why did the courts refuse to look at all the evidence? 50,000 sworn affidavits. Plus analyses from experts: pollsters, statisticians, accountants, psephologists, IT engineers, et al. Why did they refuse to hear the witnesses? I would suggest because they knew what was there, and they couldn’t face it. They were terrified of being called racist, of being targeted by intimidation and violence, and their families likewise, of setting off riots, worse than anything which had gone before. Much easier to pass the explosive parcels of evidence upwards.
As for unity and going forward, pull the other one, whatever Anne Applebaum may say.
You don’t unite the country by getting yourself installed behind barbed wire and with 26,000 soldiers between you and your own people. That is done to intimidate the country, especially when all 26,000 were purged by the Democrat controlled FBI beforehand, because, as was publicly explained, all “white males” are potential terrorists and assassins.
You don’t unite the country by autocratically cancelling, at the stroke of a pen, a dozen or more popular policies on the first day. Many more autocratic decrees have followed and the Senate is clearly redundant.
The administration has been flooded with swamp creatures, Big Tech reps and corporate lobbyists, plus the worst remnants of the Obama regime. Government and Media, together with Cyberspace, are now seemlessly at one. With the help of internet censorship and deletion, history is being rewritten and anyone who complains of what happened is condemned as an insurrectionist or terrorist. Corporate cronies are already depriving the opposition of funding and threatening them with lifelong unemployment. Big Tech is continuing to silence the opposition in its disingenuous way. At least the opposition in Russia can communicate with the world, after a fashion.
Finally, you don’t unite the country by falsely impeaching a popular President twice, and trying him unconstitutionally after he has left office.
The problem is that we can prove neither that Biden won the election nor that Trump won the election. There is no audit trail for the votes. Biden is certainly a demented idiot, and is already doing tremendous damage to the country. What we can do is demand a fully auditable system so that we never again are left with a disputed election. But, of course, that’s exactly what the Donkeys don’t want.
Yes, indeed, the evidence was never tested in court. Even if the Georgians refused to release theirs, there was a lot to test. This was the moment the Supreme Court was instituted for and it funked it. Presumably out of very understandable fear. This was the last chance to clean up the corruption, the fraud, and the intimidation. There is no imperative for this incipient one party state to do it now.
I’m sorry but it could and can be proved that Trump won. Take Georgia. How is it 10300+ dead people managed to vote ? One believes in the Resurrection, but 10300 did so to vote for Biden ?! How about all the underage voters, or those registered at a commercial address in contravention of State Law. Far from winning Georgia by 13000 votes Biden actually lost it by well over 125000.
The fraud is so blatant and so clumsy it would have disgraced the worse banana republic. The trouble is having got away with it so easily there will now never be another free and fair election held again. Biden has had his ‘Reichstag’ moment and the ‘Enabling Act’ will be coming down the track pretty fast.
And not satisfied with election fraud on a grand scale now you see the evil Pelosi et all Impeaching a former President -what they are actually doing is trying to pass a Bill of Attainder, contrary to the Constitution and the Law. Their aim seems modest, merely to bar Trump from ever attaining office again, but what will stop them next time seeking his execution – have him beheaded in front of the Capitol building, selling tickets to defray costs. As Sir Thomas More said in ‘A Man for all Seasons’ “I give the Devil benefit of Law for my own safetys sake”. One day the executioners will come for sc*m like Pelosi and Biden for revolutions always devour their own. ‘Behold, the head of a traitor’.
‘Behold, the head of a traitor’ God bless that day
Senator Rand Paul says he is going to spend the next two years going round the Republican controlled State legislatures to persuade them to do just that.
You are commiting thought crimes citizen. If you don’t want to be declared a domestic terrorist I suggest you “improve” your thinking.
Webb is really re-writing history with poor analysis on this particular point:
“they abandoned radical plans to create something like the NHS for all Americans, when in fact even the watered-down Obamacare was fought against tooth and nail by the Congressional GOP and still is”
His second part is largely irrelevant, because “something like the NHS” couldn’t get enough Democratic votes in Congress to pass.
Webb has apparently memory-holed that it took quite a bit of arm-twisting and horse-trading to muster the Democratic Congressional votes needed for the ACA (i.e., “Obamacare”). And that was with a plan that deliberately tried to have features that could win support from constituencies such as hospitals and their employees (hospitals are major employers in every U.S. state and Congressional district ), doctors, and health insurers. And, perhaps even more important for political reality, something that would be accepted by the sizable number of Americans who were more or less happy with their existing health insurance arrangements.
Webb ought to look back at the political reality of the situation with analysis from someone other than “an advisor to Bernie Sanders”.
Yes, and look also at the cost of Obamacare. Not many people can afford a $1500 a month policy that covers nothing until you’ve spent close to $15.000 in deductible. How is that affordable?
This article assumes Biden and his administration is capable of doing the right things. It has already demonstrated it is not. Biden himself is fatally compromised by his corrupt connections for self-enrichment or family nepotism’s sake to China, Russia and the Ukraine. On his first day in office he signed EOs that will cost upwards of 70,000 jobs, while his party is bent on an impeachment process that will only serve to drive division not heal it. The fact is at the macro level Trump was doing the right things and the Biden administration will probably try to upend all that good and hamstring both the economy and social reconstruction as a result. Happy to be proved wrong, but….
What an awful smug article by a BBC apparatchik. He seems unaware of what Joe Biden really represents. Unity agenda? That is Orwellian doublspeak. Biden, purely for the purpose of keeping his own power and keeping his own relatives out of jail, is doing whatever he is told and adopting hard core positions that are anything but unifying on everything from energy to transgenderism. This is the same guy who was mentored through the senate by a “Grand Kleagle” (whatever that is) of the KKK – Robert Byrd – who Joe so loved that he gave the eulogy at his funeral. Can you imagine if Trump had eulogised a KKK leader???? The BBC appears incapable of reporting anything negative on Biden and this article simply reinforces the perception/reality of bias. Perhaps people realise that persuasion and fact checkers are agenda-driven propagandists and avoid them. The BBC itself has seen a collapse in trust in its news output and this article shows why.
Perhaps the Biden administration will mouth “unity” platitudes whilst simultaneously using whatever procedural tactics are necessary (eliminating the filibuster; budget reconciliation) to provide precisely the sort of concrete material benefits for the vast majority of the American citizenry the author proposes.
But that would not be directly in the interest of the donor class that owns the DNC (nor the DNC itself, which likes nothing so much as the lucrative fundraising that permanent “struggle” between pantomime opponents makes eternally possible), so I won’t be holding my breath.
if the ‘vast majority’ of the public saw benefit in the proposal ideas, there would be no need for ham-handed tactics that essentially force through policies.
That’s what elections are for Alex — “the vast majority of the public” can render their verdict in the midterms.
But like I said, I expect a smug satisfaction at the gridlock by the usual suspects by and for whom the American political process has been (and remains) purchased.
“serious misjudgements: they fruitlessly waited in vain for Republican support before spending money on infrastructure; they abandoned radical plans to create something like the NHS for all Americans,”
All I can say is: Thank God! The last thing we need is an NHS or trillions more pork doled out to favored groups. Keep that crap in the UK.
Just think how many more caravans there would be if you had an international health service, free at the point of use, like ours!
There would just be even longer wait times than you have now.
You had it right here: “…Biden might reply: “Huh? What does this actually mean?”.
Can you think of another country that elected someone in the throws of dementia as their president or leader?
Eric Kaufmann argues populism is about culture; Anne Applebaum says demagogues stir the population up. Eric Kaufmann uses data
https://faithangle.org/sess…
oh dear Justin… I used to listen to you your US views with respect, if not total agreement. but i fear too long a stint on the cosy Today Programme has put you a long way down the route to full Beboid metamorphosis.Strategic thinking is not what Biden and his backroom are about, they are now incapable of such, not interested in such, rather it is vindictiveness that they proffer…”There is sometimes an almost vindictive streak in politics whereby governments follow policies which they know will harm the electorate, but nonetheless, they keep them, sometimes for years….” ,Jacob Rees-Mogg. And that will lead the USA spiralling towards 2024, if the cement of the Constitution has not crumbled completely by then.
Then again,as an earlier poster eluded to, perhaps there is a an over-arching strategy welding the vindictiveness into one aim, the Californication of the USA ?
“more likely than other Americans to have heard about a number of false or unproven claims” As determined by who? The “fact” checkers? lol. The conclusion isn’t bad though. I have to give him that.